When thinking about upgrading there are three success criteria; User adoption, productivity and cost. How your new system delivers against these three metrics will ultimately decide the ROI for the project.

First off Dynamics 365 has a great new user experience that is very intuitive and will drive user adoption. The new solution is split into role based apps, for customer service, sales or marketing users and they highlight relevant information and functionality for these roles. These apps have a number of specific productivity boosting tools as they are designed for their role based audiences.

New Features of Dynamics 365

Microsoft has added a number of new features to its CRM offering over the years especially since the launch of Dynamics 365, making the system more powerful than ever.

New Outlook Application – allowing you to track conversations and add contacts from Outlook.

Learning Path – a built in training tool that can offer task recording or relevant information at each step in a process.

Connected Field Service – empowers employees on the go with the right level of information to deliver support for customers.

Project Service Automation – take your sales opportunities and turn them into projects. Identify the resources you require, and a number of other project management tools to manage projects effectively.

Gamification – enables employees to participate in individual and team-based competitions that motivate them to achieve certain pre-defined KPI’s by offering prizes, awards, privileges, and recognition.

LinkedIn – full LinkedIn integration available via LinkedIn Sales Navigator to provide you more information, routes to market and relevant connections for your prospects.

Power BI – takes your dashboards and reporting beyond static graphs. This gives you more power and flexibility to drill down into your data to gain better insights and forecasts.

Customer Portal – a completely new portal that can be used to capture requests and interact with your customers, integrating straight into your CRM.

Benefits of moving to the cloud

If you are currently using an on-premise Dynamics CRM solution, then there are also many benefits of moving to a cloud based solution. Your sales team is active and on the move, your CRM system should be too.

A cloud based solution gives you:

Anytime, any device access.

Built-in intelligence powered by Azure.

Regular upgrades – Microsoft will upgrade the platform on a regular basis so you are always on the latest version.

No extra costs – everything is included even hosting.

Connections – being cloud based makes it easier to connect your CRM to a wide range of other solutions. There are a wide range of connectors and third party options available which easily connect to your cloud based CRM.

Upgrading to Dynamics 365 gives you a whole range of new features and tools that weren’t previously available on Dynamics CRM. In addition, over time, Microsoft will add even more as part of their regular updates.